


Bits and Pieces

by jaystrifes



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Amnesia, M/M, boyfriends to exes to strangers, but later on probably picks up the more common trope, dirk has A Lot of self-loathing and jake is selfish, strangers to friends to boyfriends again, they have to learn to work on this kind of stuff in their relationship
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-05-18
Updated: 2017-05-18
Packaged: 2018-11-02 02:36:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,090
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10935213
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jaystrifes/pseuds/jaystrifes
Summary: After suffering a head injury in a motorcycle accident, Dirk pulls out of his coma, only to be left with a missing gap of a about three years of his memory, three years which spanned his relationship with Jake, from beginning to end. With Jake now suddenly back in his life, Dirk struggles to regain a sense of the time they spent together, hoping to figure out where it went wrong last time to prevent the same thing from happening next time -- or if there should even be a next time.





	Bits and Pieces

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is based on [the retrograde amnesia art and AU by city](http://cityinthesea.tumblr.com/post/158767124544/hi-its-my-birthday-heres-a-self-indulgent-thing). Cross-posting from [my tumblr](http://jaystrifes.tumblr.com/post/159589520055/sooooo-i-tried-my-hand-at-writing-a-thing-based-on). Originally meant to be a oneshot thing but I got a few ideas I wanted to expand on a little more.

Most of your physical injuries from the accident have healed by now. Your mental ones have not. At the hospital, they told you it’s likely that you’re suffering from retrograde amnesia. Basically, your memories from before the accident are fucked, but you were warned that they might return to you in flashes, in bits and pieces.

You have a feeling you’ve spent most of your life dealing in bits and pieces. Maybe that’s why this doesn’t feel so difficult.

You remember some things in astonishing detail, right off the bat. You remember the name of the pet goldfish your brother bought you when you were six, but not your brother’s name.

(The goldfish was named Tangerine for his vivid orange scales. You remember your brother telling you that they matched your eyes. You don’t remember what color your brother’s eyes were.)

You also don’t remember how your brother died, but you remember parts of his funeral, and the way the stiff black collar of your shirt chafed at your neck. You remember that he taught you how to do your tie, because you wore suits frequently when you were younger but you don’t remember why. Why can’t you remember his _name_?

With some help, you find the right prompt to type into the search box – Dave Strider. You spend an hour or three reading about him, trying to put the information together with your memories of him. He was famous for writing and directing satiric movies. There’s footage of him, interviews, even a Super Bowl commercial, which strikes you as ridiculous because your brother wasn’t the type of guy who would have been remotely interested in football. You wonder why you can remember that Dave hated sports, but not that you attended all his premieres. You only know that part from seeing the pictures circulated in online tabloids, all more than a decade old.

The reports on your brother’s death say the cause was a fatal car accident, 13 years ago. They blew it up to be something of a national tragedy, but the world moved on, inevitably. You would have been 10, then. How long was it before you moved on, too?

You’re 23 now. God. You’re only two years younger than he was when he died. You might have been on your way to join him if that motorcycle accident had been any worse than it was. He was in a coma for several weeks, like you, but he didn’t make it out of his. It’s a goddamn mystery to you, why you lived and he didn’t. You’re not foolish enough to subscribe to the belief that “everything happens for a reason,” because it’s bullshit and that kind of thinking solves no problems. You’re not bitter enough to blame him for not staying alive for you, but you think you might have been, before you forgot everything in your own accident.

You must have had something to wake up for. You just can’t remember what it was.

There’s a soft tap on the bedroom door. You become aware that you’ve been sitting with your head in your hands, your elbows propped up on either side of the keyboard. You’re pathetic. You don’t have the right to mourn someone you can barely claim to have known, at this point.

“Strider?”

You pull yourself together, blink your eyes dry. Dave Strider has been dead for years. Dirk Strider should be beyond crying for him by now. But maybe it’s for you, not him, and maybe the water rising in your lungs, the drowning and the choking, is not about losing your brother but losing half of the place he used to occupy in your brain.

And he is not the only one with a once-important space in your mind that has gone missing. Jake’s hand brushes your shoulder. On impulse you look up at him, and immediately regret it. You weren’t prepared for it. You’ve been watching him from a distance for a while now, side-long when he isn’t watching back, too afraid to look at him directly, because maybe if you stare at him you’ll remember too much. Shouldn’t you want to remember? There’s no legitimate reason you should feel so anxious about digging into your past with him.

Jake isn’t someone you can revisit on the internet, but you feel like it would almost be easier if he was. No, he’s alive and he’s here, and facing him is too much and you’re fucking screwed. You can’t bring yourself to ask the questions you should – about how he mentioned being your boyfriend in the past tense, how did that happen, and how long ago, and how did it begin and how did it end. You can’t do a damn thing but stare at him like a deer caught in the headlights.

His eyes are so green, and you know those eyes. You know them in the dark, the ring of pine almost swallowed by black, in bed with the windows open and the curtains fluttering, and you know them new-leaf fresh and glowing with life in the bright heat of the day with the AC on high and every fan in the apartment turning, and you remember your body slick with sweat. You don’t know why you pair those particular details together.

Actually, you have a pretty good guess. Not one you can voice without untangling a whole other knot, and you’re not sure you want to. So you look away.

The conclusion you come to, for now, is that you really shouldn’t have chosen to stay in fucking Texas. Even now, the room is stuffy and suffocating, and your t-shirt feels plastered to your back. There’s a bad taste on your dry tongue.

“Are you quite all right, Strider?”

You blink. “I’m fine.” You hate the uncertain tremor in your voice.

If Jake doubts your answer, he doesn’t show it. He seems preoccupied with picking at his cuticles, looking everywhere but at you as he says, “I, uh, cooked up some supper for us, chap. Figured we can sit down on the couch, eat and watch TV, you know, just like old times.”

“I wouldn’t know, no,” you respond, not hostile but apathetic, and you despise yourself for it, for feeling like indifference is your natural state – or at least it’s the face you have to present to others. Regardless of what Jake might have once been to you, or how the relationship went south, he doesn’t deserve this kind of treatment.

“Oh,” he says simply, blankly, as if you stole the wind out from under him and now he’s hovering lost just before his free-fall.

Maybe this is what went wrong, maybe you were the bad half. Or maybe you did develop the ability to cultivate some kind of warmth in you, your own skewed way of showing love, after so many years of building up walls and your persona of indifference. But if it ever existed at all, it’s gone missing now. You have no way of knowing what kind of boyfriend you were to him, unless you ask. You’re not going to.

“I’m not hungry,” you murmur. Almost as an afterthought, you add, “I appreciate the offer.” It’s the truth, but it would be kinder of you to lie and choke down whatever food he’s made just to give him some comfort.

Jake’s hesitant silence hangs for a moment longer, and then you witness the moment he puts his foot down, the way his eyes steel. “Dirk, you haven’t eaten all day, you’ve been hunched there in front of your computer for hours and haven’t moved even a smidge since I last checked on you, and frankly I’d think myself a poor caretaker if I let you go on like this.”

You wonder if he’s used to having to wake you up to your own pitiful self-neglect, if he’s done it before. He must have, because you know he’s right. Resigned, you push your chair away from the desk and stretch out your legs before you stand. He waits for you, shepherds you down the hallway, as if he thinks that you won’t actually come with him if he doesn’t make you. He would probably be right again.

Once you get to the living room adjacent to the kitchen, you see no way out of it, so you find a spot on the couch, and Jake brings over two plates of beef stir fry that look better than delicious. The strips of meat are drizzled with teriyaki sauce, cooked vegetables laying on top, along with a generous amount of spices you can’t identify by smell. Despite yourself, your mouth waters.

To save a little dignity and keep from digging in right away, you ask him, “Have you always been a cook?”

“Well, I was a cook for us at least, yes.”

“Ever thought about going on one of those competitions on TV?”

“And end up stone deaf after being perpetually yelled at by Gordon Ramsay? No thank you.”

You smile, exhale a puff of air that might be a diluted version of a laugh, and it’s enough to make him break into a buck-toothed grin. Seeing it leaves an ache in the cavity of your chest, and you don’t want to dwell on why, so you suggest, “See if MasterChef is on.”

He does, and it is, but the TV ultimately ends up as white noise in the background to you. You’re too busy thinking. You wonder if you’ve always had that problem, if your goddamn brain has ever shut up, ever stopped over-rationalizing, for more than two seconds. The only time it might have ever been quiet was when you were in that coma, teetering on the brink of nothingness. Maybe you should put yourself in life-threatening condition more often, just to test the hypothesis.

You don’t feel very hungry anymore, but you’ve already got a forkful of food, so you make yourself go through the motions of eating. You wouldn’t want to offend Jake – maybe he’d understand, but then again, maybe not. Did he ever understand you? Was it a communication issue that led to your breakup? Whose fault was it? (Yours, it had to have been yours. You know that self-sabotage is the only thing you’ve ever done well.)

Sitting next to him like this on the couch, eating together, watching TV, it all feels unnatural but familiar at the same time. You can’t pinpoint a real memory of a parallel occasion, but you do have the sense that it might have been like this once, only without so much distance, without your caution to keep your leg from brushing his. This isn’t right, either. This is just an imitation. Whatever you once had is far beyond your reach. You rip apart a strip of meat between your teeth and set your fork down with a clatter.

“Penny for your thoughts, Strider?” Jake is watching you. You keep your eyes forward, focused distantly on the TV screen. It’s not that you mind him being here, being around you, but you have the strangest sense that you should. One way or another, his presence should make you feel _something_ , whether it’s old love or a new anger.

“How did we meet?” you ask, almost against your will. “And how did it end?”

You still don’t know if you want to go down this road yet. But the alternative is this awkwardness, having an ex-boyfriend here in your apartment as what amounts to a roommate and not knowing your history with him. It doesn’t give you enough of a foundation to build from, to make a decision.

This doesn’t feel like home. You need to know if that’s because he’s here in your space, or because he isn’t really _here_ with you.

Jake clears his throat. You don’t get distracted by the bob of his Adam’s apple. You stare at him head-on, intentionally, for the first time.

“You’re…sure? I mean, I realize I’m going to be biased, and I wouldn’t want you basing your memories off of my side of the story rather than your own, and I –”

“Tell me.” You force your voice hard, sure-sounding, more certain than you are. You can convince him, if not yourself.

“All right.” Jake takes a deep breath, obviously on edge, antsy, bouncing his knee. You resist the urge to hold his hand and give him reassurance. He could lie to you, knowing you’re relying blindly on his word. But this has to begin somewhere.


End file.
